Better on a blog.
Somewhat tangential to the normal subject matter of this particular soapbox (and I swore I’d never blog about blogging) but… (you knew there would be a ‘but’!)
I get a email newsletter from a web consultancy firm called Bowen Craggs that focusses on highlighting good (and sometimes bad) practice on (mostly) corporate websites. Sometimes it is a bit banal but other times there are some really interesting ideas highlighted and the format is nice and tight so no wasted time plowing through too much information.
Today I read this article discussing their take on Web 2.0 and how they saw it (and Mr. O’Reilly) as being too dogmatic as a framework to be of use in shaping how the net is or should be used. Without going into a critique of the article here, I wanted to make a couple of comments as a response - one of which was ‘Why isn’t your newsletter a blog?’ (not from a zealot’s point of view, but genuinely because I think it would suit their objectives better) - and to my chagrin, ironically there is no way to reply on the page! No way to ‘comment’. Other than sending an email via the generic ‘contact us’ button.
And so I am forced to ‘comment’ here in the hope that perhaps someone over at Bowen Craggs will stumble on to this. (Yes I know I could email them the comment or the link but I like this way better.)
I’m not suggesting that you need to be some kind of Web2.0 / new new new thing moonie to be an effective website consultant, but (again the ‘but’) I would think you would want to make damn sure your own website and use of technology was snakes-on-the-plane good. No?
April 1st, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Hi,
Well we finally did stumble across this - only took us 9 months!
Why isn’t the newsletter a blog? Because it’s a newsletter. Our readers like the inbox format and when we did try a blog for a few months; readers kept on reading the newsletter. I’m sure you will agree that the customer should get the format they prefer rather than the latest technology.
Our audience are primarily corporate communications folk - who have little interest in nor understanding of labels like “2.0″. Why saddle a perfectly good thing with a techie moniker?
We don’t have a comment feature on the website because it is not a blog. We’re hoping the start the blog again this year (2007).
We’ve recently launched a new website that runs on Ruby on Rails (very modern). Take a look at www.bowencraggs.com/ftindex and check out our latest research into corporate websites. Not much evidence of ‘web 2.0′ in the corporate world but it’s coming.
regards
Dan